hands. He was holding it up to whatever light he could find, trying to get a better view. For his part, the old man was making desperate gurgling sounds on the back of his throat, his eyes rolled up into his head so that only the whites showed, yellow and awful as the few shafts of light to penetrate the gloom caught them. Spittle rolled down his chin and into his beard.
“What is it? What is it, man? Tell me!” K roared, as if sheer volume would break through the barrier between them.
But Morgan couldn’t answer. All intent of lying to the baron had been lost, and now all hope of soft-pedaling in an attempt to stay on the right side of the baron was also a cause that was given up. For Morgan had wanted to steer clear of the dark force that One-eye and his motley crew were pursuing. He wished them well, but he knew when he was facing something greater than he had ever believed existed. He didn’t even care about the children. The ones he knew. Even the ones he cared about. Such was the fear that this dark power had instilled in him with one swoop.
Morgan wanted to steer clear, but the dark force wouldn’t let him. It was almost as if it was sentient, seeking to use him as a tool, to scare the baron away from further pursuit.
Struggle as he might to deny it, Morgan was seeing what was happening to Ryan and his people. He hated it, for so many reasons.
But he couldn’t deny it.
* * *
RYAN YELLED in anger and surprise. He was furious with the fates and with himself. He was certain that he had a sure footing, and that he would be able to take the weight of the Armorer as he reached out for him. It should have been simple to grab J.B. and stop him from falling. And yet the ground had seemingly given way beneath him, causing him to be dragged in the wake of his stricken friend. For the second time in less than twelve hours he felt that he was plunging to his doom, except that this time there was no one to stop him. Unlike the night before, the others were too far out of reach, being behind the Armorer as he was the first to take the plunge.
As he fell, weightless, in the air it seemed to him that he was falling at an infinitesimally slow rate. He felt as though he slowly turned in the air, away from the swirling and formless shadows below so that he could see the anguished faces of Doc, Mildred, Jak and particularly Krysty as they stared down, helpless. It was almost funny. They looked so ridiculous in that moment when Ryan knew even their pain and longing could no longer help him.
Maybe that was what did it. At that moment, when Ryan gave in to what he saw as his fate, and his inevitable end, it was as though he ceased to fall. He felt as though he was lying on static ground, as though J.B. was lying next to him. He turned his head and could see that the Armorer was level with him. Surely that wasn’t right? Shouldn’t J.B. have fallen first and been beneath him? The expression of bewilderment on his old friend’s face told him that thoughts of a similar nature were crossing the Armorer’s mind.
The others, looming over him, seemed to be closer than they had a moment ago. Too close. And the air, which had been whistling around his ears, now seemed so static and dry. Dusty, almost…
A blinding pain shot across his skull, running from the back of his neck, up and around so that it blinded his only eye, making him shut it tightly to try to stop the agony, which seemed as though it wanted nothing more than to take a physical form and force its way out through the socket.
He screamed.
And when he opened his eye once more, he was bemused to see that the others were, indeed, standing over him and J.B. Only instead of looking down at them, they were looking around.
Without even sitting up, he knew why. The hard-packed dirt was solid beneath him, and he could see from the periphery of his vision that they were on level ground. Level with where they had been before their descent. Raising himself on one elbow, he looked around. To his left, he could see the flat expanse of waste that they had trekked across the previous day. He recognized the scrub and rock they had used as landmarks to count off the miles.
They should be in the crevice.
But it was no longer there.
More than that, to his right, where there had previously been only the flat lands that stretched on the other side of the crevice, there was now a wall of rock that stood about forty yards high, on a steep incline, about three miles away. It was like an inversion of the crevice.
And maybe it was just as real?
“I don’t know what just happened, and to be honest I don’t really give a shit how. The real question is, what can we do about it?”
Ryan turned to the Armorer, who was sitting up, his arms clasped around his knees as he surveyed the territory. The laconic wryness of his tone belied the real urgency of his question.
“Keep going,” Ryan answered simply. “I figure that we really were seeing them in the distance, and when they disappeared it wasn’t down a nonexistent hole. It was behind some kind of wall they could put up mentally. Something that could get inside our heads.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Doc murmured. “Down the hole and out of sight. Make something grow smaller and then make it grow bigger. Is it really that way or does it just seem to be that way?”
“Not make sense.” Jak spit. “Have to go like real, then see. Just be ready for any shit.”
“Looks that way,” Krysty said slowly. “That crap that Jak and me were feeling last night… Mebbe that’s the mechanism they use, a kind of super doomie power that can play on our fears.”
“How know what scare us?” Jak questioned.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to know us.” Mildred shrugged. “Anyone getting this far would be exhausted, so a deep drop and a narrow path would be daunting. Like that wall is going to be bastard to climb,” she added, indicating the distant barrier, which seemed to stretch across the horizon.
“Can’t be that hard if it doesn’t exist.” J.B. shrugged.
Mildred laughed shortly. “Still hurt like hell to get down that nonexistent drop, didn’t it? Wonder what we would have looked like to anyone watching as we went down an imaginary drop?”
“No more stupe than we’ll look climbing an imaginary mountain,” Ryan replied. “But if that’s what we have to do—”
“That is if it truly is imaginary,” Doc interjected. “There is, of course, the possibility that the abyss was a dream, yet the mountain is real. The one a mask for the other.”
“You know, we could talk about that all day,” J.B. said quietly, spitting on the ground in disgust at their impotence. “We’re not really going to know one way or the other, even when we reach it. But one thing I can tell you for sure is this—the longer we stand around, the farther those coldheart bastards get from us, and the harder it’s going to be to get the kids back and get our jack.”
The Armorer was right. If they intended to finish their mission, they had little option but to continue regardless. And so they started forward again, in silence, hearts and limbs heavy, and all the time knowing that this was exactly the frame of mind that the clouding of their reality had been intended to produce.
Just how hard was it going to be if they had to fight on two planes simultaneously: the mental and the physical?
* * *
MORGAN’S
